BLOG:
Legalizers
Score
Big
This
Week
1/7/05
Reprinted from DRCNet's Prohibition and the Media blog -- visit https://stopthedrugwar.org/blog/ to check it out! Those of you who read our newsletter, Drug War Chronicle, might know about the work of Prohibition and the Media coauthor Nicolas Eyle and his organization, ReconsiDer: Forum on Drug Policy (http://www.reconsider.org), based in Syracuse, New York. A few weeks ago one of our articles, Syracuse Reconsiders Drug Policy, reported on hearings by the Syracuse City Council at which speakers discussed legalization and options available to the city for reform (https://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle-old/362/syracuse.shtml). The hearings followed up on a report by former City Auditor Minch Lewis, which Lewis prepared at Nicky's suggestion. This week Eyle and company scored big, with an editorial by syndicated columnist Neal Peirce of the Washington Post Writers Group titled "Legalizing Street Drugs an Experiment Worth Considering" (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2002138380_peirce03.html). Peirce's column quoted extensively from Eyle and from a number of the reformers he brought to Syracuse, including Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (http://www.leap.cc) executive director and Prohibition and the Media coauthor Jack Cole. Those of us who are active in drug reform frequently discuss and debate the approaches we take to the issue. The Peirce column lends some weight to the corner of the movement in which people like Eyle, Cole and myself reside, the corner that openly and directly talks about prohibition itself and the legalization alternative. That's what they did in Syracuse. They were taken seriously -- admittedly because of the years of work that ReconsiDer has already done there, perhaps -- and the case for legalization has as a result been presented on editorial pages in papers around the country. And this did not come at the expense of the partial reforms that are politically viable in the shorter term, such as harm reduction, decriminalization or deprioritization -- those were also discussed. Score one for our side. Peirce's columns are syndicated by The Washington Post to papers around the country. We don't know what papers chose to run it, but it's possible that quite a few did -- please let us know by posting to https://stopthedrugwar.org/blog/ if you've seen it. The link provided above is from the Seattle Times -- visit http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/contactus/ and go to the bottom right of the page to get letter to the editor information. Prohibition and the Media is an ongoing critique in blog format of selected mainstream news articles of direct relevance to the prohibition/legalization debate -- as well as discussion of other interesting developments or resources related to that them. We hope you'll visit https://stopthedrugwar.org/blog/ each day to hear the half of the story that the media didn't tell, for types of news stories that Drug War Chronicle hasn't focused on before, to send letters to the editor, and to join and follow the discussion. Visit http://www.ga0.org/drcnet/smp.tcl to subscribe to our blog announcements list or to update your DRCNet subscription info.
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