An Open Letter to the 'Officials'
(Note: This column has been abridged ever so slightly, with removal of outdated references to the event in san Diego.)
By Keith Taylor - Voice of San Diego
Wednesday, Sept.20, 2006 |
Dear Mayor Sanders, City Attorney Aguirre, Police Chief Lansdowne, the
San Diego City Council, and the San Diego County Board of Supervisors:
I
figure just one letter to all of you will do. It is about a shared
problem. Also, it will save on postage. If you folks had been as frugal
as I, the city wouldn't be in the fix it is in today.
But I digress, we have a problem
here involving crime, one not specifically yours. In fact, you may take
some comfort in the fact that the nation as a whole is handling it even
worse than San Diego did its pension problem, and it's not even looking
for a solution as hard as you guys.
I say it's time for some
rational thought. Einstein once defined insanity as doing the same
thing over and over, expecting a different result. Now, no matter how
tempting it may be, I'm not going to call you lawmakers, law enforcers,
and law deciders insane, but many of our laws are just that.
Take
the increasingly draconian ones designed to protect us from drugs. They
are not working, and we here near the border bear a special
responsibility to look for solutions, and those solutions do not
require more jails.
Yet, that's mostly what we're getting.
Building jails is the biggest growth industry in California and the
nation today. As it is, we have to build the things because we have
more people per capita behind bars than any country in the world, and
that's not cheap. We throw more money at the drug problem than any
country in the world -- all this while various hallucinogens are more
plentiful on the streets than ever before.
I
wonder what I missed all these years. I never considered myself
sheltered, but I had been in the Navy for 17 years before I even saw
marijuana. Then I didn't even try it for another 10 years. After all
that, rather than wanting to rape and kill as I'd been promised, I
simply fell asleep. Now, another 20 years down the road I fall asleep
without any artificial soporific.
So, where does rational
thought come in to all this? First, we ought to pay attention to Albert
and stop doing what doesn't work. Then we ought to try and figure out
what does. That's pretty much the advice of Judge James Gray of Orange
County. Judge Gray will be the guest of the San Diego Association for
Rational Inquiry (SDARI)...
Gray wrote a book about drugs, "Why Our
Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It -- A Judicial
Indictment of the War on Drugs." He will be speaking courtesy of a
group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP).
No bleeding heart liberal, Judge Gray was a conservative Republican who
was appointed to the bench, then to Superior Court by Governor
Deukmejian.
The judge fits in well with the outfit sponsoring
his talk. LEAP is comprised of police, parole, probation and
corrections officers, judges, and prosecutors. It even has prison
wardens, FBI and DEA agents to help make up their bureau of more than
100 speakers. LEAP is based in Medford, Conn.
Here is a blurb from their website: The
mission of LEAP is to reduce the multitude of harms resulting from
fighting the war on drugs and to lessen the incidence of death,
disease, crime, and addiction by ultimately ending drug prohibition.
It aims to do this by:
Educating the public, the media, and policy makers about the failure of current drug policy by presenting a true picture of the history, causes and effects of drug use and the elevated crime rates -- more properly related to drug prohibition than to drug pharmacology -- and; To restore the public's respect for police, which has been greatly diminished by law enforcement's involvement in imposing drug prohibition.
COMMENTS?
Oh, yeah! Keith garners a shitload of comments with every column - pro & con... Here's a taste:
"Betty": "...It's high time some readers of the Voice band together to combat the lunacies of this self-righteous, holier-than-thou (if you pardon the egregious pun), smug, would-be pundit.
REV RANTS: I'm inclined to think Hillary & Keith could do worse than to torque off the likes of "Betty" - whom we'll mark down as "believing" and a likely "Bushie", separating herself from the ... ahem... "ignorant masses".
The problem with too many Americans, in and out of government, is that they're so insulated from different solutions that are working in other countries.
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