Your help is needed to stop new drug prohibitions moving quickly through Congress. As we reported recently in Drug War Chronicle, bills to place synthetic cannabinoid ("spice" or K2) and mephedrone (marketed as "bath salts") products in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), have passed committees in the Senate and the House of Representatives, and could have House and Senate floor votes at any time.

Along with adding new criminalization to our society already burdened by massive arrest and incarceration rates, Schedule I placement will ban medical use and make it difficult to research possible medical uses of the substances too. There's no evidence of a looming crisis over either of these substances, and Spice/K2 sales have already been barred temporarily under a DEA "emergency order" while the intended CSA process of studying a drug before making decisions about it gets carried out. Most of all, reflexively enacting new drug prohibitions at a time when prohibition itself is increasingly coming into question is backwards -- there are better options available for reducing the potential of these substances to do harm.

Please use our web form to contact your US Representative and your two US Senators in opposition to these unnecessary prohibitions. Please follow-up by calling their offices too -- if you don't know their numbers (or aren't sure who they are), you can reach them by calling the Congressional Switchboard at (202) 224-3121. And please use our tell-a-friend form to spread the word.

Click here for updates on these and similar bills in Congress, and here for new prohibition bills in the state legislatures -- votes already taken in the states are tallied here. (We don't have state alerts set up yet, but you can use our web site in the meanwhile to find out what's going on in your state and contact your legislators about it.)

Thank you for taking action!