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Call for Higher Voices

Stephen Hershey
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In just a few days, UN dignitaries and officials are meeting to discuss new approaches toward ending the drug war, including decriminalization and regulation. Sign this petition for your voice to be heard.

Politicians agree that raiding, burning drug farms, and hunting addicts is becoming unnecessarily expensive. Illegal drug trade continues to facilitate massive amounts of death and insecurity throughout the Americas. Contrarily, countries with more lenient drug laws, such as Switzerland, Portugal, and Australia, have seen a major decline in crime, addiction, and death.

Liberating the drug culture would arguably create an entirely new, empowered citizen. Recreational drugs are already a representative characteristic of the forward-conscious community--if they are decriminalized, more free spirits would start coming out of the woodwork, ready to express who they are.

While this may seem to be an overwhelming or idealistic change, this motion is a small stepping stone to creating larger movements in the future. Eventually, countries will be forced to address the issues at hand. Sign this petition and help start the process of change.

Image: "War on Drugs" by Andraculos on Flickr courtesy of Creative Commons Licensing.

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Comments

thanks for posting this!

Submitted by gushtunkinflupped on Tue, 05/31/2011 - 19:58.
But Australia? lenient drug laws? I think your confusing Australia with some other place

When you can buy all the politicians you need ...

Submitted by Peter Meyer on Thu, 06/02/2011 - 01:28.
It won't make any difference even if a million people sign that petition -- they don't make the drug laws. If they did, drug use would have been decriminalized long ago. Drugs are illegal because their illegal status means huge profits to drug smugglers and dealers, not to mention the huge amount of taxpayer money that goes to support the prison industry. Where huge amounts of money are being made because laws have been passed to make something illegal, there will be more than enough money to bribe (in one way or another) lawmakers not to change the law. As is well-known, almost all politicians and legislators have their price. If you're making a huge amount of money from smuggling drugs big time (especially if you have government connections) then you can keep doing so simply by paying to the politicians and legislators whatever they want. Of course, that's only in countries where the politicians are blatantly corrupt (now, which countries would they be?), and in such countries drugs will remain illegal as long as this corruption is not eliminated. There have been lots of calls recently from intelligent people, some of them public figures, for an end to prohibition. Such appeals to reason are useless as long as there are people who are making so much money from the illegality of drugs that they can afford to buy all the legislators and politicians they need to keep things as they are. For more on this see Prohibition: The So-Called War on Drugs and some recent (well-meaning, well-argued, but probably useless) appeals to reason here.