My mind is made up

When I first became aware of the drug war, I was a spirited anti-racism activist living in the Deep South. I chiefly saw drug prohibition as a war against people of color and wanted the crusade to end. I didn't yet know about the suffering of debilitated cannabis users, the widespread and avoidable risks to public health caused by abstinence-only policies, and the fierce linkage between the artificially inflated street prices of illegals and the subsequent emergence of crack and meth as a means to cut corners and cost. There was a time when I simply hoped that, in the spirit of bi-partisan unity and brotherly love, lawmakers would rewrite the prohibition rulebook in order to make the war "more equal." Little time passed, however, when I came to see that the war could not simply be modified to eliminate racial discrimination and inequality, but that prejudice was at its very core. Even still, I couldn't dream of illegal drugs simply becoming legal. I once reasoned that there must be a middle ground between the status quo and the free market. For the longest time, I actively promoted medicalization and decriminalization. Throughout this journey, I have been a eager student to learn as much as I can. I have also come to question everything that is sacred to drug policy reformers. These days I am quick to have doubts about those reformist strategies that have become trophies of the movement. Along the way, I have graduated from thinking that the movement can carry on with dismantling the drug warrior's castle without having a concrete vision for a world without the war on drugs. As reformers across our movement continue to push hard towards realizing incremental sentencing and legal reforms, the time has come for our movement to embrace legalization as our ultimate aim. Formally acknowledging that ending drug prohibition will give birth to a legal framework of some kind will shake up the politicians and public like never before! The movement's agenda will get more attention, more criticism and scrutiny from warriors, media and the Right. And isn't that what we want? And as it has been noted numerous times by other reformers, we would be emboldened by the truth: when legalizers put up a fight against prohibition in the past, the legalizers declared sweet victory.