WHAT YOU CAN DO!

There are numerous levels of involvement and kinds of activism you can be involved in beyond letter writing. For example: Help and volunteerism is what we're about. If you have the abilities and/or desire we need help in the following categories: Letter writers: Read the DrugSense weekly and/or review the collection of news articles from the shortcut at the top of the previous page. Select an article that motivates you and write a letter using the email address usually provided with the article. Alternately sign up for our national Focus Alerts which select one particularly important news item this week which is focused upon by our entire national network of letter writing volunteers. Subscribe to either the DrugSense Weekly Newsletter or the National Focus Alert service by filling out our In A Hurry form. NewsHawks: Find news articles on drug policy issues and either scan or copy them and forward them to editor@mapinc.org This can be done by monitoring any of hundreds of on-line newspapers or by scanning articles from you local paper. You select the paper(s) you choose to monitor. Recruiters: Visit news groups, email chat lists, and other sources for large groups of reform minded people and encourage them to visit our web pages, subscribe to our DrugSense Weekly newsletter and to get involved. Other creative methods of attracting more members is highly encouraged. Fund raise: We are always short of funding either contribute or try to find others to do so. Contribute on-line! Or you can mail in your tax deductible contributions to: DrugSense PO Box 651 Porterville, CA 93258 Checks can be made out to either DrugSense or The Media Awareness Project (MAP) Become a State/Issue Leader: Start a local reform group in your state or country. If you have 20 people who will help by engaging in the above types of activities we will provide a free email list to coordinate your groups activities and provide guidance to get you started. Once you get going we will also create and support a web page for your group. All at no charge to your organization. Spread the word about our huge searchable archive of news articles at www.mapinc.org/drugnews. It can answer practically any question on drug policy, help you prepare for debates or media appearances, provide a research tool for local media, enhance your fact checking and accuracy for letter writing and much more. Use and distribute the valuable collection of Drug War Facts. It is a large collection of facts citations and myth de bunkers. If the average citizen was aware of just this collection of facts support for the "War on Drugs" would erode by orders of magnitude Editors: We are constantly looking for editors to help post the hundreds of news articles we find on drug policy matters each week. Full training is provided and you can utilize our excellent "roboeditor" software to assist you and to determine how much or little you are able to do at any given time. To look into becoming a DrugNews Editor please contact our senior editor Richard Lake. Focus Alert Specialist: (FAS) We need people to select articles and write up Focus Alerts. These are alerts that are distributed to state or issue based lists as well as to our entire national list of activists when appropriate. These Focus Alerts help coordinate large numbers of letter writers to coordinate their activities towards a specific "target" news article thus increasing our impact and effectiveness. Again a template and training is provided. For more information on becoming a Focus Alert Specialist please contact Jo-D Dunbar or Mark Greer. Broadcast Media Specialist: A relatively new area of interest for the MAP effort is reporting on drug related broadcast media events and encouraging letter writers to respond as appropriate to encourage accuracy in reporting in this important medium. We use the "TVEyes" service to report such event to you. This service will email you whenever there is a mention of your key words on the air. You then report this event to your group and letter writing to the TV station(s) or networks are encouraged. See: www.TVEyes.com/try_it.asp. You can of course broadcast a short report of anything you happen to catch on the air as well. Ideally all such reports should include Email contact info to enable easy letter writing follow up by all interested group participants. When appropriate an occasional national Alert will be broadcast to the entire network.