Candidates/Races

Dear friends, Most LEAP members are asking for tasks they can accomplish to help achieve our goal. Here is one that will only take a few minutes and will have tremendous impact on our legislators and other politicians. Copied below is a message we hope you will send out to every local and national politician you care about to see how they respond to your concerns about the war on drugs. A LEAP member recently sent out a similar set of email messages and was amazed by the responses he received! Please copy and paste the following message, fill in the politician’s name and your own contact information at the bottom, and send it via E or snail-mail to every candidate you are considering supporting on Election Day. This is our chance to make LEAP known to many politicians at a time when they are likely to reply to you. Please include [email protected] as a bcc on any messages you send so we can learn how many politicians we are contacting. Thank you! Dear (Politician): Before I cast my vote in the upcoming contest for your election, I must first pose a question to you: Do you support and agree with the following statements and principles, based on the Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) http://www.leap.cc: After nearly four decades of fueling the U.S. policy of a war on drugs with over a trillion tax dollars and 39 million arrests for nonviolent drug offenses, our confined population has quadrupled, making building prisons the fastest-growing industry in the United States. More than 2.3 million of our citizens are currently incarcerated, and every year we arrest an additional 1.9 million more, paralyzing our prison and court systems. Every year we choose to continue this war costs U.S. taxpayers another 70 billion dollars. Yet, despite all the lives destroyed and money wasted, illicit drugs are cheaper, more potent, and far easier for our children to access than they were 38 years ago at the beginning of the war on drugs. Meanwhile, people continue dying in our streets while drug barons and terrorists grow richer, bolder, and more heavily armed. This is the very definition of a failed public policy. This is not a war on drugs—it’s a war on people: our children, our parents, ourselves. The first thing we must do is admit that most of the deaths, diseases, crimes, and addictions attributed to drug use are actually caused by drug prohibition. Prohibition has paradoxically increased the number of people in the US above the age of twelve who use illegal drugs from 4 million (two percent of the 1970 population) to 112 million (46 percent of the 2005 population), according to DEA statistics. In June, 2007, the US Conference of Mayors unanimously called for an end to the war on drugs and for drug abuse to be dealt with as a health issue. Once we adopt that approach, we can stop the horrors associated with prohibition by removing the profit motive generated within the drug culture. How do we do that? We end drug prohibition. We legalize all drugs so we can regulate and control them and keep them out of the hands of our children, who now report that it is easier for them to buy illicit drugs than cigarettes or alcohol. As long as these dangerous drugs are illegal, we relinquish control to the street thugs and international cartels, which have enormous monetary incentives to hook our children. I look forward to your response on this important issue. If I do not hear back from you, I will assume that this issue is not important to you, or that you do not support the principles of LEAP, and I will act accordingly on Election Day. Thank You, Your name Your address Your phone numbers Your email address