TIME TO SAY NO TO WAR ON DRUGS

IMAGINE a world without the scourge of our current punitive drug
policies. Imagine a world where we mothers no longer wait teary eyed
in prison visiting lines, where our daughters live to gift us with
happy grandchildren.

Imagine our sons getting in trouble with drugs and getting saved
because they are worth saving. Imagine borders where tourists bask in
the sun without fear, and drug cartels' gunshots are replaced with
lilting music. Imagine passionately wanting a better future for our
children and grandchildren so that all humanity is treated with
dignity and kindness. Imagine that billions in funding is funneled
into education. Imagine that we stop fighting a war with ourselves.

It may seem odd for a mother to make a case for decriminalizing
illegal drugs. But I can give you a grandmother's/drug
counselor's/prison visiting mom's take on how we have turned on our
own - how the "War on Drugs" has generated more victims than successes.

We turned on our own when we stopped helping people who need help;
when we attacked the most marginalized of us; when we lost our
compassion for the suffering; and when we handed over the treatment
of our sick kids to men with badges, not stethoscopes.

It happened when we stood silently while criminalizing a whole class
of people. When we made smuggling and killing profitable. And, we pay
for this by cutting education and programs that lift people out of
poverty and vulnerability, guaranteeing that nothing changes.

In real -time there is little available to help the afflicted, so we
lock them up out of sight and out of mind. In my world that means
"prison churning." My own son developed drug dependence early-on and
has now given years to a corrections system that can not "correct" him.

His chances to make a better life for his children dim with each
prison term. My life is better than my mother's, but my
grandkid'sgrandkids' lives will not be better than mine. The cost of
the failed War on Drugs is more than just the $40 billion we waste each year.

Think of the families torn apart by harsh prison sentences. How could
we let this hopelessness happen to half a million children with a
parent in prison!

As a nation we've spent billions year after year for 40 years trying
to incarcerate our way out of a health issue. Gun boats and border
patrols have been unsuccessful in keeping drugs out of this country,
with the result that it just made them more costly. Harsh prison
terms have handed us back a hollow-eyed generation of anti-social
unemployable felons.

We've been encouraged to let our kids "hit bottom," and we've
dutifully kicked our kids to the curb. Consequently we've buried a
generation of overdosed kids who could not get it right, could not
get past the stigma, could not find help, feared jail and found no
rational agent of change. We tried to "just say no to drugs" yet
today things are worse than ever.

Imagine that there are no more excuses and that there are solutions.

I am no different than you. Our tax dollars paid more than $250,000
to incarcerate my non-violent drug offender son in California prisons so far.

This waste must change. We can do this together. We have a way; we
can start by reclassifying personal possession of small amounts of
illegal drugs as misdemeanors. We can give our kids a chance to not
be labeled a felon for life.

The group Moms United to End the War on Drugs has a simple mission:
end the waste of the War on Drugs; end the failed policies; end the
mass incarceration, the overdose deaths, and the border violence.
Start by getting into action and join us in our solutions. Join us in
protest on the 40 th anniversary of this most damaging war - June 17
- - and "just say NO" to the War on Drugs.