Cross-country riding — literally

This week's Libertarian Enterprise starts off with an interesting kind of cross-country riding:

Skinny as a rail and pure cowboy to the toes of his boots, Texan Howard Wooldridge is a retired cop on a cross-country ride from California to Manhattan. He figures he'll get there by late October, maybe early November. And this is not his first such trip.

Howard is the US coordinator of the Long Riders' Guild, an invitation-only organization of "equestrian explorers," each of whom have ridden more than 1,000 continuous miles on a single horseback journey. This is at least Howard's third time crossing the US, his most recent ride having been from Savannah GA to Newport OR in 2002.

[. . .]

Howard isn't crossing this continent just "because it's there"—he's making this ride on behalf of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. LEAP is an association of current and retired police officers who believe that America can best solve its national drug-crime problem by ending drug prohibition, much as it solved its very first national crime problem by ending alcohol prohibition. Howard's usual way of putting it is to say he believes that the most productive way to address drug use is through doctors and clinics, not judges and prisons.

I'm usually pretty wary about this sort of activity: doing some sort of unusual journey to "raise awareness" about an otherwise unrelated topic. This is perhaps why I'm not a natural marketing person . . . the connection isn't clear to me, and therefore I suspect it's not going to be clear to the general public either.

But then again, perhaps I'm just too cynical for my own good. . .