SAFER's Mason Tvert has a new piece on The Huffington Post discussing the SAFER Campuses Initiative Nationwide Day of Action and growing SAFER movement on campuses across the country. 

Here's an excerpt, or you can CLICK HERE to read the entire post:

College Students Nationwide: Allow Marijuana as a Safer Alternative to Alcohol

Students at more than 80 colleges and universities across 34 states held rallies on their campuses this week to recognize April as National Alcohol Awareness Month. At first glance, these events don't appear to be anything out of the ordinary. The message behind them, however, was anything but ordinary.

At the rallies, students called on their respective schools to "stop driving them to drink" and urged them to allow marijuana as a safer recreational alternative to alcohol. In particular, the students argued that laws and policies on and around most college campuses punish students more harshly for marijuana use than for alcohol use, steering them toward drinking and away from using a far less harmful substance instead: marijuana. 

Every day college students demand the right to use marijuana, but it's not every day that they do so in an effort to curb alcohol use and abuse. Needless to say, the effort raised eyebrows and generated quite a bit of media attention.

A story out of Las Vegas involving a marijuana legalization campaign and former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is stirring up quite a bit of news coverage.

As SAFER co-founder and Marijuana Is Safer coauthor Steve Fox of the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) explains in a post on AlterNet:

Today, in the heart of Sin City, former Alaska governor, Republican vice presidential candidate, Fox News “analyst” and the darling of the Tea Party set Sarah Palin delivered a keynote address to attendees of the Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America’s convention. Might this be a sign that Palin is prepared to take up the fight for individual freedoms espoused by Ron Paul and other libertarian-leaning leaders of the Tea Party movement?

One group in Nevada is testing this hypothesis by asking Palin to put her mouth where their money is. Nevadans for Sensible Marijuana Laws (a ballot advocacy group backed by my organization, the Marijuana Policy Project) has offered to pay Palin $25,000 to give a similar speech to marijuana policy reformers. Such a speech would convey a simple message: If we can defend and even celebrate the individual freedom to use alcohol, we should certainly allow individuals the freedom to use marijuana, a substance objectively less harmful than alcohol.

CLICK HERE to read the rest of Steve's post on AlterNet.

The SAFER Campuses Initiative Nationwide Day of Action generated a significant amount of media coverage, including a couple national hits and a number of local and campus hits across the country.

Two particular highlights were this feature story by the Chronicle of Higher Education --  the nation's "No. 1 source of news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty members and administrators -- and this piece that appeared on the Washington Post's higher education blog.  An archive of all the news coverage is included after the jump.

Ultimately, students at more than 80 colleges and universities ended up taking action on their campuses that day, distributing more than 20,000 pieces of literature explaining the relative safety of marijuana compared to alcohol, and delivering copies of the Emerald Initiative and the book, Marijuana Is Safer: So why are we driving people to drink?, to more than 80 college presidents and chancellors. 

SAFER carried out this project in conjunction with Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) and campus chapters of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws(NORML), and the effort was documented on the blogs of these organizations, as well as the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP).  Click HERE to read the post from MPP's Steve Fox, who is a co-founder of SAFER and a coauthor of Marijuana Is Safer. 

An archive of news hits from the Day of Action and more photos follow after the jump.