The mother of slain drug war victim Rachel Hoffman has started the Rachel Morningstar Foundation to advocate legislation requiring legal counsel for prospective drug informants as well as decriminalization of marijuana in Florida. You can make a donation here.

For anyone still catching up on Hoffman's story, this heartbreaking video is a good starting point:


Rachel was involved in NORML and SSDP. She was one of us, and while I wish she'd thought better than to become an informant, we still don't know what threats police used to coerce her into assisting in the operation that took her life.

Rachel is someone we might have met at a conference someday. Someone who might have posted a comment on a drug policy blog or responded to an action alert. For whatever reason, that simple thought bothers me in an uncomfortable way that the drug war atrocities I cover daily often do not. It's a feeling I've had to shake off as I type, reminding myself that I've seen too much of this already to be rattled by the inevitable.

Every drug war victim has a story, each of them upsetting and important in its own way. We know all too well the common thread that binds these tragedies together and we'll stand without hesitation behind the Hoffmans as they've so bravely stepped forward so that their loss can become something positive, something Rachel would be proud of.

One of the many valuable services performed by Pete Guither at DrugWarRant is that of finding the most mind-numbingly absurd drug war editorials, reading them in their entirety, and illuminating the gratuitous logical fallacies upon which pro-drug war editorialists are so habitually reliant.

Recent examples can be found here and here.

Believe me, it ain't easy responding with any civility to the frightened and frustrated fulminations of these paranoid drug war cheerleaders, but Pete does so as gracefully as can be expected.

I know from painful experience that it begins to feel like you're banging your head against a wall defending the most basic principles against attacks from scared and angry people. Still, there's value in demonstrating that incoherent pro-drug war rants will be picked apart and their authors identified unflatteringly. These people do google themselves, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if a few of them have taken a long pause after being eviscerated by Pete Guither and his readers.

People with bad ideas about drug policy at least care enough about the issue to speak their minds. As long as they know the issue matters, there's a chance they'll come to reach the right conclusions. Bob Barr and the brave folks at LEAP are proof that our best allies don't always start out on our side.

Update: I changed the title to say "Pro-drug war editorials" instead of "Anti-drug editorials." While our opposition likes to think of itself as "anti-drug" that's often not the effect of their policy preferences. I also reject the kneejerk "pro-drug" label often used to smear reformers, so I shouldn't be defining our opposition as "anti-drug" either.