Dear Friend,
The past few weeks have been overwhelming and painful. We’ve seen heartbreaking headlines: devastating overdose deaths, massive cuts to public health services, and escalating military actions. It’s a lot—and it’s shaping daily life in our communities, our families, and for the people we love.
When it comes to drugs, the realities are impossible to ignore: fentanyl, the overdose crisis, and the struggles of addiction weigh heavily on people we know and care about. We must respond with urgency and compassion. Instead, the federal government is doubling down on violence—actions that are reckless, unconstitutional, and deadly.
Proven interventions that save lives—naloxone, fentanyl test strips, medications for opioid use disorder, and low-barrier treatment—are being drastically cut, even though they have driven the recent declines in U.S. overdose deaths. Meanwhile, militarized “drug war” approaches at home and abroad are being expanded—undermining due process, fueling extrajudicial killings and arrests, and diverting resources from real solutions that actually protect our communities.
Here at home, we’re seeing military deployments at the border and takeovers in cities like D.C. and Memphis, alongside aggressive immigration raids nationwide. Marijuana criminalization is increasingly used as a pretext to arrest, jail, and deport people—even in states where marijuana is legal. Families are being separated, losing jobs and homes. All this while nine in ten Americans support marijuana legalization.
Abroad, drugs are being used to justify bombings and extrajudicial killings—acts of violence that could drag us into endless conflict and bloodshed. Americans don’t want more wars. We want safety and stability through investments in our communities, not costly conflicts that threaten to spill back home. And we know from experience that these crackdowns don’t work. After more than 50 years of the drug war (killings, arrests, and supply-side enforcement), drug sales and addiction persist, while cartels adapt by producing even more potent and dangerous drugs like fentanyl. As long as politicians focus on punishment instead of reducing demand, the harm will continue.
We know where this path leads. Around the world, leaders have used the war on drugs to target marginalized communities and consolidate power. In the Philippines, for example, Duterte’s crackdowns led to thousands of extrajudicial killings, disproportionately harming poor and working class people while sparing the wealthy. The result wasn’t safety, but an erosion of freedom. Families were torn apart, and democratic institutions were weakened. That history is a warning for us right now.
These are difficult times. But we can move forward together by being courageous and insisting on what actually saves lives. That means fully funded health services, accessible treatment, and overdose prevention strategies that every community can count on. It also means working with our foreign allies to implement evidence-based strategies that work in their countries too. These are solutions that cross ideology and geography. They’re the common ground we can all agree on.
Our communities deserve compassion, care, and urgency. We deserve leadership that rejects reckless violence and embraces life-saving solutions. Let's fight together for solutions that work.
