[Farm A.C.]

Digg and Reddit Users Want to Legalize Marijuana

Digg and Reddit Users Want to Legalize Marijuana
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Posted in Chronicle Blog by Scott Morgan on Tue, 10/16/2007 - 8:55pm

The rise of news aggregator websites like Digg and Reddit has become a surprisingly helpful asset to online activism for drug policy reform. These sites allow participants to submit links with their own description, at which point other users vote to determine which stories make it to the coveted main page. Digg, for example, directs so much traffic from its front page that users have coined the term "digg effect" to describe the inevitable server crash that occurs when Digg links a site with insufficient bandwidth.

StoptheDrugWar.org first experienced "the digg effect" in August with the "Marijuana Dealers Offer Schwarzenegger One Billion Dollars" story. Once linked at Digg, the blog post and accompanying press release generated over 100,000 hits, crashing our server repeatedly for over 12 straight hours. It was a bittersweet triumph since few visitors were actually able to view the content due to website malfunctions (and we couldn't receive donations!). Nonetheless, the message about marijuana policy reform was clearly resonating with a massive new audience.

Between Digg and Reddit, we've now had several stories take off, pulling in unusually high traffic and pushing the drug policy debate beyond the self-selected audience of seasoned reform activists. The rising tide has lifted other boats as well, generating massive attention to Pete Guither's "Why is Marijuana Illegal?" and SSDP's "End the Drug War Draft!". Just last week, a front page Digg hit left Mitt Romney's presidential campaign reeling when video of his rude treatment of a medical marijuana patient went viral.

Perhaps it's not so surprising that the new era of user-generated content and internet video would favor ideas that have for too long been relegated to the fringe by the mainstream press. We're witnessing the burial of the antiquated notion that only anti-drug scare stories will sell, and it's long overdue to say the least. The stigma of the "legalization" label, along with the brute force of the law itself, has silenced so many would-be drug war critics, yet the anonymous and democratized realm of online political debate now rages without regard to the philosophical prejudices of the past.

Of course, winning the vote in an artificial internet democracy isn't going to end the war on drugs. But it certainly proves the demand for balance in the drug war debate. As the mainstream media continues to struggle with even the most basic realities about drugs and the terrible war on their users, the truth has to find a home somewhere.

http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle_...ers_want_to_le

[DSW90049]

Let's all keep pounding away on every kind of media, digital and otherwise, that we can access. I agree that the rules are all different now that anybody can blog and post on websites like WT.

Let's let our voices be heard both in the macro and micro sense- what I mean by that is that each of us needs to be an ambassador for MMJ as a movement-- every one of us can persuade others to change their views of MMJ and to become voices which cannot be ignored.

Remember, the next person you meet and persuade that the drug war against MMJ is irrational and WRONG, is another potential voter for the candidate next year who can control what the DEA's new policies will be-- you also learn a lot about how we and MMJ are preceived by those who are so far ignorant, or worse, only informed by FOX news and many others who run stories only for shock value and could frankly care less whether you or I have a good (or at least less painful) day!