CHIPPING AWAY AT THE DRUG WAR FOR 500 WEEKS

Roughly ten years ago, DrugSense Weekly distributed its first issue.
Today, we release issue number 500.

Our goal has been to present a comprehensive summary of essential
news and details from the drug war in a weekly capsule. We continue
to try and fulfill that goal, while attempting to keep our approach
current, so you may have already noticed a somewhat different look
with this issue. I will discuss those changes in more detail shortly.

We've published a history of DrugSense ( see
http://www.drugsense.org/pages/history ) and details about how
DrugSense Weekly evolved ( see
http://www.drugsense.org/dsw/2003/ds03.n300.html#sec5 ) in this space
before and you can consult them if you are interested in the early days.

In fact, we've published a little bit of everything that exposes the
grim failures of the drug war. Not only coverage and commentary on
every major prohibition-related story in the world for the past
decade in our news sections, but we've also highlighted hundreds of
independent, individual voices through the links at Hot Off The Net,
the Letter Of The Week and the Feature Article.

Some may view our perspectives as biased against the drug war, but
it's impossible to sift through thousands of articles and pieces of
personal writing to see prohibition as anything but a monumental,
heart-breaking disaster. Our bias has always been toward reality,
not the fantasy of a drug-free world as presented by professional
drug warriors.

Through the creation and distribution of this newsletter we hope to
have raised others' consciousness on the issues.

In an effort to continue to do that, we have streamlined the
newsletter a bit. In the news sections, the number of lines of
information about the stories has been reduced, and placed in a
different position. The source and date of the article now appears
directly after the headline. Readers who would like more information
about the piece, or to read it in its entirety, can simply click the
link in the "Continues:" line which still closes each news story excerpt.

Those who read this publication on the Web will note a new table of
contents designed to make it easier to find what you're looking for
in the DrugSense Weekly.

As always, we appreciate our readers and contributors who make this
all possible. If you would like to support our work at DrugSense
Weekly, and to help end the drug war, please make a contribution to
DrugSense here - http://www.drugsense.org/donate/

We'll keep at it, and with you're help now, maybe there won't be a
need for this newsletter less than 500 weeks from now.