If You Want to End the Drug War Tomorrow, Support Reason Today!
Since our founding in 1968, Reason has relentlessly exposed the war on drugs for what it is: an assault on individual rights that intensifies every social ill it claims to ameliorate.
In print, online, and in video, no other publication has so consistently and forcefully investigated the ways in which the prohibitionist mind-set destroys basic concepts of personal responsibiity and restraints on government actors. The drug war shreds more than the dignity and livelihoods of the victims of no-knock raids gone horribly wrong and the people living in neighborhoods traumatized by the violence that inevitably attends to black markets. It also creates all sorts of moral hazards for law enforcement while shredding the Constitution and abetting the growth of the surveillance state. For 46 years, Reason has revealed the sick ways that virtually every aspect of contemporary life—education, foreign policy, prison policy, popular culture—has been made to serve the goals of the drug war.
And with marijuana legalization fast becoming a reality, no journalistic venture is in a better position to explore the ways in which a post-prohibition America might flourish. That's one of the great benefits of taking a libertarian, "Free Minds and Free Markets" point of view. We don't just spin utopian schemes detached from brute reality and we don't just bow down at the altar of economic efficiency. We try as hard as hell to work through how freedom in intoxicants can best play out across every aspect of politics, culture, and ideas. Click through the image above to see our recent special landing page dedicated to mapping the "long, hard road to safe, legal pot."
During our annual Webathon this year, we're hoping to raise $200,000 to help support Reason in 2015. If you care about ending the war on drugs, please consider supporting us with a tax-deductible donation. Go here for giving levels and swag details. Your money will help Jacob Sullum continue his path-breaking work here and elsewhere. The author of countless articles about the drug war's failings and alternatives to prohibition, Jacob is also the author of Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use and is widely recognized as one of the most outspoken and persuasive propoents of drug legalization.
Your support will also go to projects such as the feature-length, award-winning documentary America's Longest War, which chronicles in heart-breaking detail how families and whole countries such as Mexico have been devastated by the unintented but totally predictable effects of the drug war. You'll be funding videos like "Sex, Spice, and Small-Town Texas," which shows how "a rogue prosecutor makes the drug war very personal" and why federal agents targeted a law-abiding vaping store for no good reason. You'll help us make the next—and hopefully last—iteration of a video with a headline like "Police, Shoot, Kill 80-Year-Old Man in His Own Bed, Don't Find the Drugs They Were Looking For."
And you'll be helping us bring to light appalling, enraging, change-making stories such as the one told in the video below by Amanda Winkler. The title—"Riverside Cop Tricks Autistic Kid into Buying Pot"—gives away the main plot, but you need to watch the full 7-minute documentary to get the full measure of just how low the drug war has brought us all.
This video gave rise to coverage of the same story at Rolling Stone, Vice, and elsewhere, which is another way that your support helps. Reason discovers and hones stories, issues, policies, and points of view that travel far and wide beyond our own large and growing readership (we pull 4 million visits a month at Reason.com, 1 million views a month at your YouTube channel, and about 50,000 subscribers to our print edition). Our work goes into the media slipstream and shows up all over the place, amplifying our message.
And hopefully, helping to end the war on drugs sooner rather than later.
So if you care ending drug prohibition and you want to live in a libertarian world of "Free Minds and Free Markets," check out our donation page now.
