Press Release: El Paso City Council Votes on Marijuana Legalization

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: February 9, 2010

CONTACT: Tom Angell - (202) 557-4979 or media //at// leap //dot// cc

EL PASO CITY COUNCIL VOTES ON MARIJUANA LEGALIZATION

Ending Prohibition Would De-Fund Murderous Mexican Cartels

EL PASO, TX -- The El Paso City Council will consider a resolution on Tuesday that calls for the legalization of marijuana as way to strip Mexican drug cartels of the rich profits they make from the illegal market. The resolution is aimed at putting a stop to the cartel violence that has killed almost 10,000 people since the beginning of 2007.

"When I worked to defend the border in El Paso, I witnessed the failure and futility of the war on drugs firsthand," said Richard Newton, a retired Customs and Border Protection agent and a speaker for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), a global network of pro-legalization cops, judges and prosecutors. "After 40 years of waging the drug war, we've only made the cartels stronger and richer than ever. It's clearly time for a new approach like legalization, which would bankrupt the cartels and put a stop to their killings."

Previously, the El Paso City Council set off a nationwide debate on the merits of legalization in early 2009 when it unanimously passed a resolution that merely called for serious consideration of ending prohibition as one possible option. Mayor John Cook vetoed that resolution and the council refrained from overriding the veto only after receiving threats from Congressman Silvestre Reyes that the city would lose federal stimulus money if it insisted on supporting a discussion of the merits of legalization.

The current resolution that explicitly calls for the legalization of marijuana can be viewed at http://www.elpasotexas.gov/muni_clerk/agenda/02-09-10/02091011A.pdf

Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) is a 15,000-member organization representing police, prosecutors, judges, FBI/DEA agents and others from around the world who want to legalize and regulate all drugs after fighting on the front lines of the "war on drugs" and learning firsthand that prohibition only serves to worsen addiction and violence. More info is available at http://www.CopsSayLegalizeDrugs.com.

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Conference in El Paso

LEAP is in Texas this week. Terry Nelson is at the University of Texas at El Paso, where he is participating in "A Global Public Policy Forum" about drug prohibition. The description of the conference is compelling:

Along the border the drug war has reached our backyard and our neighborhoods. Yet we continue our bi-national way of life. A public evaluation of the successes and failures of the policy is long overdue. However, such an evaluation should shift from a Washington D.C.-centered policy analysis, to where the drug war is happening now: in our border community.

The Newspaper Tree, El Paso's online newspaper, quotes Nelson from his panel yesterday:

He spoke about the root of crime in countries affected by the drug war. “Prohibition of drugs causes crime. The drug use doesn’t. It’s a bad choice. It’s a bad decision.” He continued: “Drugs and illegal trafficking corrupts everything they touch. All the countries in Central America have deaths because of the drug war. We can’t think of it as just an American solution or American problem. It’s a global problem.”

P.S. I'm going offline for about a week, so a few of the other folks at LEAP will be handling the blog for the next few days. I have written some posts which will appear automatically, but I won't be responding to any comments or emails until the end of the month. After working hard on the blog for over a month, I'm going to enjoy some downtime in the "real" world.