A FEW TIPS ON WRITING LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

MAP appreciates and encourage all letter writing efforts on behalf of drug
policy reform. We believe it to be one of the most powerful and cost
effective methods of drug policy reform advocacy that anyone can engage
in. See http://www.mapinc.org/lte/value.htm

Below are a few tips to hopefully make your efforts even more productive.

Please remember to include your name, city, state, and phone number on all
Letters to the Editor (LTEs). This is a requirement to be considered for
publication for most newspapers. Your phone number will not be published
but is only used occasionally to insure that you wrote it or to notify you
if the intent to publish the letter.

We encourage you to forward your LTE to MGreer@MAPinc.org for posting to
the sent LTE list. Please DO NOT simply CC Mark Greer. Many papers will not
consider any letter that has been copied to others. Instead you should
either BCC it or send a separate copy.

If you send out a lot of LTEs you might want to consider signing up to the
SentLTE Email list. Subscribing will enable you to watch what others are
writing, share LTE ideas and suggestions, and save me from forwarding the
letters to the list for you ( I don't mind of course but every bit of time
I can save goes to some other important tasks) To join the Sent LTE list
see: http://www.mapinc.org/lists/index.htm

You may also want to join the MAPTalk chat list if you haven't
already. It's a great place to exchange drug policy info and ideas.
http://www.mapinc.org/lists/index.htm

There also is a wealth of information and tips on letter writing and
activism at: http://www.mapinc.org/resource/

If you would like to research and/or copy LTEs that have been published in
the past there is a vast collection of drug policy related LTEs at
http://www.mapinc.org/lte/ We enthusiastically encourage plagiarism from
this valuable archive. Please copy and paste from this archive and send
your version to other papers at will. The archive can be searched quickly
on key words so you can easily find a previously published LTE on the
subject you are addressing.

One MAP Motto is "A letter a month that's all we ask." We endorse and
appreciate the efforts of our more prolific letter writers, of course, but
if all activists made a habit of writing a bare minimum of one LTE a month
we could have a much more effective Media Awareness Project.

So by all means please "write away" and please keep up the great work!