Your $5 cover includes a copy of the magazine, and we’ll be selling discounted subscriptions as well. Our friends from the Dominion News Cooperative will be on hand selling copies of their extra-special Olympic Issue, and we’ll even have a representative of the Pirate Party of Canada there if you’d like to chat with them about their platforms and positions. (Also note that another of our small-magazine compatriots, Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action, are having their own launch party the same night just up the street, in case you’d like to hit two events in one night, you party animal you.) Hope to see you Thursday!

What: This Magazine Legalize Everything Party
When: Thursday, November 19, 2009, 7 p.m.
Where: The Painted Lady, 218 Ossington Avenue, Toronto

Legalize Everything! party sponsors:

So our website bit the big one on Friday morning, which kind of cramped our plans for Legalization Week’s big finish. Everything seems to be working again, our apologies for the interruption. Without further ado, here it is, the call for legalization that I think might be the most controversial in the issue: Laura Kusisto writes that we should stop the prosecution of hate speech:

We protect religion and equality because we recognize that these freedoms make individuals’ lives better. But we protect expression because unfettered dissent is the only way to protect democracy. When a government official sits across from conservative blogger Ezra Levant in a 25-square-foot conference room and asks him to explain his decision to publish the infamous Danish Mohammed cartoons, she is asking a single citizen to justify his political beliefs before the power of the state. Levant may be a blowhard, but that scenario should give everyone—left, right, whatever—serious pause.

…Which marks one of those exceedingly rare occasions when This Magazine finds itself on the same side of an argument as Ezra Levant — who, incidentally, being a good sport, has donated a copy of his book, Shakedown, which we’ll be raffling off at Thursday’s launch party for the issue.

Be sure to vote in our poll on the issue (see right) and have your say. And check out the whole “Legalize Everything” package of articles, which are now all online for your reading pleasure/rage/irritation/curiosity:

• Tim Falconer: Fix the health care system and end suffering — legalize suicide
• Jordan Heath Rawlings: Pay indie artists and break the music monopoly — legalize music piracy
• Katie Addleman: Crack down on organized crime and save addicts — legalize hard drugs
• Rosemary Counter: Support small farms and get tastier cheese — legalize raw milk
• Laura Kusisto: Strengthen democracy and fight bigotry head-on — legalize hate speech

Our (totally made up, unofficial) Legalization Week continues today with Katie Addleman’s exploration of the drug trade, and the catastrophic effect prohibition has had on law enforcement, gang violence, addicts’ health, and community safety:

Ounce for ounce, marijuana is worth more than gold, and heroin more than uranium. Yet it’s only as a direct result of international policy that drugs are so valuable; if they weren’t illegal, they’d be worthless. Prohibition floats the drug trade by raising potential profits to astronomical levels, and the drug trade in turn floats the gangs who control it. “Because of … their illegality and associated criminal sanctions,” writes Chettleburgh, “those willing to trade in them—drug cartels, organized crime syndicates, so-called narco-terrorist groups and street gangs—can demand high prices and derive great profits.”

“You’re talking about a profession where people accept a risk of being murdered, execution-style, as an occupational hazard,” said Bratzer. “How is a mandatory minimum sentence going to deter a person who already accepts the risk of being shot and having their body dumped in a car?”

Read the article in full here. And be sure to vote in our poll on drug policy above, too.

Tomorrow: Rosemary Counter on raw milk.

For day two of what we’ve dubbed “Legalization Week” here, Jordan Heath Rawlings writes about a plan from the Songwriters Association of Canada that would throw open the file-sharing doors to every Canadian and find new ways to help musicians make a living from their creativity. It’s just one of many proposals that have been made over the years — including the ones in today’s survey at right — to solve the problem of helping artists make a living in a time when digital music is easy to duplicate at virtually no cost. Cast your vote and let us know what you think!

Jordan writes in today’s piece:

Legalizing file sharing is the musical equivalent of legalizing prostitution: it’s already happening, crackdowns don’t stop it, and there are existing commercial frameworks that would improve working conditions and curtail exploitation.

The only things standing in the way—in both cases—are the taboo (it’s still illegal, after all) and the middlemen, those who stand to lose millions of dollars if the workers are allowed to own the means of production.

Piracy is happening all the time, so the question is how to transform people’s natural behaviour — wanting free stuff — into a plan that builds, instead of erodes, artists’ careers.