CONTACT:
Valerie Douroux
801-953-3754
Ben Valdez Jr.
801-792-8468

U of U STUDENTS TO HOLD CANDLELIGHT VIGIL FOR MEXICAN HIGH SCHOOLERS KILLED IN DRUG WAR

SALT LAKE CITY — Utah Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) will honor the memories of the latest victims of the War On Drugs with speeches, candlelight and a moment of silence from 5 to 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 11, 2010, at the Federal Building in Salt Lake City. The public is invited to attend.

The Univerity of Utah chapter of the national organization Students for Sensible Drug Policy will join several chapters of SSDP across the world to memorialize 14 innocent students who were killed by the Sinaloa Drug Cartel in Juarez, Mexico, Jan. 10, 2010. Most of those killed were high school students celebrating a soccer victory, the youngest was 13 years old.

“In almost any other place or time on this Earth, this would be considered an unbelievable and unacceptable act of violence coupled with cries of outrage and reform,” says Valerie Douroux, president of the U of U chapter of SSDP. “But for these students in Juarez, Mexico, there remains a stunning silence broken only by the sounds of mothers grieving.”

“Mexico accepts the bloodshed of innocent high school students as typical, normal activity, but we do not,” she says. Douroux goes on to say that the bloodshed of the failing U.S. Drug War manifested in Juarez should be a “wake up call for all Americans.”

SSDP and other Utah-based organizations contend that the War On Drugs creates a black market so “vicious and uncontrollable,” that the only way to bring peace and end the violence is to have a policy of “harm reduction” instead of prohibition. Harm reduction would treat drug abuse as a health problem instead of a criminal problem.

Ben Valdez Jr., vice-president of the Salt Lake City Chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), agrees. “The only way to take power away from the Mexican Cartels, and organized crime in general, is to repeal drug prohibition, which creates criminals in the first place,” Valdez says.

Valdez explains that the misuse of drugs does present serious problems in society, but drug prohibition escalates the violence and chaos. Innocent people are caught in the crossfire, he says.

“America’s drug prohibition is a kinetic force that harms every aspect of Americanism and has spilled over and intensified in Mexico,” Valdez continues, “The problem we face today is that we have exported our Drug War and it has now come home to roost but with much more momentum and ruthlessness. These children did not have to die.”

SSDP works to reform laws that support scientific research and harm reduction to more peacefully and reasonably deal with drug problems in our communities.

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This post was mentioned on Twitter by HispanicPR: Update your Hispanic media lists: Utah Latino paper starts Feb. 9: Spanish-Language Newspaper to Launch Next Month… http://bit.ly/bbIry1...