February 16, 2001

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‘Traffic’ vs. reality

Just in time for the Academy Award nominations, the friendly folks at THE LINDESMITH CENTER-DRUG POLICY FOUNDATION have put together a new website, Stopthewar.com, spelling out just where the much-hyped film ‘Traffic’ does and doesn’t intersect with the real-life War on Drugs.

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A summary of the film points out places where it accurately reflects reality (wealthy high school kids do drugs, just like Michael Douglas’ on-screen daughter) and where it misleads (unlike said daughter, most young people caught with hard drugs spend more than a few hours in jail and can’t get treatment). There’s also a jazzy Flash-animated game where players can try out different strategies to win the drug war — only to be met with sobering stats on why approaches from locking up all drug users to sending weapons to Colombia have failed to even dent Americans appetite for illegal stimulants.

Check out STOPTHEWAR.COM here.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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