Dear Friends,
To draw attention to the need for ending marijuana prohibition, SSDP teamed up with Firedoglake for our Just Say Now campaign. The campaign has been gaining international media coverage but just yesterday, Facebook banned our ads that support marijuana legalization.
The social networking site says we can no longer advertise our campaign for marijuana legalization using our Just Say Now logo, because it has a pot leaf.
We need to fight back against Facebook's political censorship. Can you sign our petition protesting Facebook's unfair policy against legalization ads? We'll send the petition to Facebook and tell the media about the site's censorship of this popular political issue.
Share the image to the right and make it your Facebook profile picture.
Facebook's decision is actually a flip-flop: the Just Say Now ads appeared more than 38 million times before Facebook issued a new policy banning them.
Our ads show marijuana leaves as part of a political campaign to change public policy. It's like telling a political candidate for office that it's unacceptable to show the candidate's face in advertising.
Sign our petition to Facebook and protest censorship of marijuana legalization.
Thank you for supporting marijuana legalization and SSDP's work. Please consider making a donationtoday.
Best,
Jonathan Perri
SSDP Associate Director
Houston-area journalist Clarence Walker reflects on the occasion of a trillion dollars spent on the failed US drug war.
No other has spent more money on the dope trade than our own U.S. Federal Government. Even the richest of drug barons and associated players, dead and alive, cannot or could not have competed with the avalanche of paperwork doled out by the government in its fight against this monster. Even the once ruthless - and now dead - Pablo Escobar and his Medellin Cartel, the Cali Cartel or the Mexican Drug Cartels cannot match the money they have earned from the drug trade with the amount the Federal Government has allocated for years in its battle to stem the flow of illegal drugs into America.
And what is the cost for our government in its fight against this narcotics epidemic, a war raged now for some four decades? By all means have a guess, but here is the figure according to The White House: One trillion dollars.
The war on drugs is the longest war the American government has ever fought, longer than World War II, the Cold War, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. And even after 40 years, the battle to enforce the laws of the land that prohibits "getting high on dope", this poisonous, addictive trade continues to thrive with the ferocity of an earthquake across the planet. Quite obviously, there is no clear-cut victory in sight.
From the outset, if the intent driving the war on drugs, beginning in 1970 under President Nixon's Administration, was to create a drug-free America, we can see that after the spending of a trillion dollars, culminating in millions of arrests, the creation of a burgeoning health care system with which to effectively treat addicts, and the billions spent on law enforcement's task of arresting drug dealers and the prison system in housing the millions of nonviolent drug offenders alongside thousands who have brought violence and death, the "war on drugs" nevertheless remains a dismal failure.
