As Todd mentioned in So Sue Me! number 9, the global drug prohibition problem is a big deal. This is also a very personal cause for me. There are significant financial, medical and civil liberties ramifications to the prohibition of drugs which should be known by everybody, because they effect YOUR pocket, YOUR police and medical services and YOUR freedom. The issues have nothing whatsoever to do with whether you personally use illegal drugs or not. This is everybody's problem and it's a global one.

Now more than ever in today's dire financial climate, we need to make sure that governments are spending our money wisely, not squandering it away in an effort to placate big business and the religious or extreme right (my opinion). I have attached three reports from Transform which outline different aspects of the problem and how they might be dealt with.

Illegal drugs. The problem is prohibition the solution is regulation and control is an eight page publicity leaflet highlighting the problem with prohibition and the benefits of legal control and regulation. If you have not already downloaded this from Todd's blog post, please do so and read this one first.

After the War on Drugs - Options for Control is a major new report examining the key themes in the drug policy reform debate, detailing how legal regulation of drug markets will operate, and providing a roadmap and time line for reform.

After the War on Drugs: Tools for the debate is a guide to making the case for drug policy reform. It is designed to: reframe the debate, moving it beyond stale ideological arguments into substantive, rational engagement and also to provide the language and analysis to challenge the prohibitionist status quo, and to make the case for evidenced based alternatives.